War Crimes
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Dresden would have been unthinkable in 1939; by the time it happened, anything was justifiable if it saved Allied soldiers. ~Megan McArdle
McArdle uses an unusually bad example to back up an unfortunate position. Of course, it is true when you opt to bomb civilian centers, especially in an indiscriminate, fire-bombing way, that you have at that time chosen to commit war crimes, and it is also true that people who have reconciled themselves to the mass slaughter of civilians have chosen to justify pretty much anything in the name of fighting the enemy. It does not follow that because you have gone to war against another state that you have therefore necessarily embarked on a course that requires you to engage in those war crimes. The choice to commit those crimes comes later, and that choice becomes inevitable only if those crimes are absolutely necessary to achieve victory. In fact, such crimes tend to stand out for just how utterly unnecessary and excessive they are. If you accept the inhuman calculations of total war and unconditional surrender, you might say that war crimes are inevitable, but if you really accept the logic of total war you don’t believe that there is anything done in war that violates morality or law, because total war is the practical negation of both. The category “war crime” presupposes a distinction between combatants and non-combatants that total war effaces, so one either repudiates total war as immoral and an invitation to the commission of war crimes as a matter of policy, which it is, or one should cease to speak of war crimes.
Even so, the example is almost uniquely bad to make McArdle’s case. Dresden was not an effort to try to “save Allied soldiers,” the dubious justification that is also usually given for the vaporisation and incineration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese, but was very definitely and consciously an exercise in inflicting terror on the civilian population and was purely a punitive raid conducted under the catch-all of “strategic bombing.” No strategic goals were advanced in burning the people of Dresden alive (not that this would have made it less of a war crime had some such goal been advanced in some way), and we should never pretend that Dresden was anything other than a bombing carried out to satisfy a vendetta in the most horrifying way imaginable.
[...] (The boldface emphases are mine.) Larison’s interpretation was not, in other words, exactly unsupported by the text he was given to work with. [...]
I’ve got no sympathy for the Kraut or Nips. They picked the fight, we ended it. To hell with them. They learned their lesson well. Couldn’t help but learn it.
I’ve got no sympathy for the Kraut or Nips. They picked the fight, we ended it. To hell with them. They learned their lesson well. Couldn’t help but learn it.
So if ‘radical Muslims’ use the same sentiment to justify 9/11, it’s still ok, right?
It’s reassuring to know that wartime propaganda can still eliminate moral reasoning even after 60 years.
[...] War Crimes 3 Daniel Larison, tedschan, OldNewEngland [...]
It’s worth pointing out that there was indeed strategic objective in bombing Dresden: to show the Russians who were advancing on Germany how powerful our fire bombing techniques were. At that time, there were legitimate fears about Soviet domination under Stalin. We basically gave the Red Army a demonstration of American and British fire power, in case they had any ideas about extending their European empire. Hiroshima and Nagasaki served a similar purpose with the Russians. Whether this justifies the action is another question. But bombing Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki certainly DID fulfill a strategic objectives.
Not sure if you read it but I recall that a book was published a few years ago that made a revisionist case for the Dresdin bombing- I read some reviews and it seemed like a plausible case.
Another theory was given by a physicist who was in Bomber command during the war. In his book he argued that many were troubled over the late raids but that there was a sense that the bureaucracy
could simply not stop and account for the rapidly changing ‘facts on the ground’ or air to be more precise (the virtual destruction of the Lufftwaffe for one) instead the lists were drawn up and simply followed automatically. Of course, no one made too much of a fuss because it was generally felt that Germany deserved whatever it did to England times 10 and few would object to getting a few kicks in after the bell. Churchill’s own squeamishness after the war over Dresdin not withstanding Bomber Command would have bombed 100 Dresdins had the clock not finally run out altogether.
Are ‘good guy’ war crimes any better then ‘bad guy’ war crimes? Can any war, total or no be waged without such acts or is that what war is? I make no claims here. But I do think that when contemplating the sui genris qualities of 9/11 particularly in it’s immediate aftermath one can summon a lot of sympathy for those men who were charged with our safety. They were lost in a blizzard of terrifying uncertainties and if they erred by going too far with Khalid Shiek Mohammed I am prepared to forgive them. And if America could still be said to be a moral nation after ww2, surely we can survive whatever sullying we must endure as we grope our way through this amorphous and terrifying threat.